One of the social media questions I’m most interested in is about whether Twitter is best suited for conversation or broadcasting. To many people’s surprise, I generally find myself on the broadcast side, and most of the data I’ve analyzed seems to back me up.

Just yesterday, I started a little informal Twitter poll and found that respondents were pretty evenly split between broadcasting and conversation.

This time, I looked at more than 100k randomly chosen active Twitter accounts and their Tweets. I analyzed the percentage of their Tweets than contain a link as well as the percentage that began with an @. I also measured the percentage of their last 100 Tweets that were ReTweeted.

I found that accounts that had high link-percentages between 60% and 80% had the most ReTweets and accounts with low reply-percentages between 0% and 10% had the most ReTweets.

If you’re interested in ReTweets, broadcasting lots of interesting content works much better than “engaging in the conversation.”

Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarrella is the award-winning social media scientist and author of four books: “The Science of Marketing,” “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness,” “The Social Media Marketing Book” and The Facebook Marketing Book.